AN UNCOMMON THOUGHT

"The real trick to life is not to be in the know, but to be in the mystery."

-Fred Alan Wolf

26 October 2016

Origin.

Doug Peacock on the origins of the first Americans ...We finally have a definitive answer to the timeless mystery
of where the First Americans came from: They walked across the Bering Straits
from Asia (and not from southwest Europe paddling kayaks across the frigid
Atlantic sea, as some have claimed).

The first people to successfully colonize North America are called “Clovis,”
and they made their appearance in the lower United States just prior to 13,000
years ago. The only known Clovis burial is in Montana, about forty miles north
of my house on the Yellowstone River (also known as the Anzick site). Here
prehistoric people buried a one and a half year old boy with about 115 stone
and bone funeral offerings, all covered with sacred red ocher. The burial
objects, discovered by construction workers in 1968, constitute the largest and
most spectacular assemblage of Clovis artifacts ever found.

A recent analysis of the child’s DNA (Nature 2-13-2014) reveals a genome
sequence showing the Montana Clovis people are direct ancestors to some 80
percent of all Native North and South Americans living today. The child’s
ancestors came over in a single migration from Northeastern Asia. This data is
a very big deal.

Archeologists call this report “the final shovelful of dirt” on the European
hypothesis. And, yes, previous to the release of this information, a popular
alternative theory argued that the sophisticated Clovis stone-flaking
technology came from Southwestern Europe, from Solutrean people living in Spain
and France who paddled across the ocean 18,000 years ago. That meant the Clovis
child should be of European ancestry. The iconic Clovis projectile point, many
of which have been found imbedded in the bones of huge animals who became
extinct around 12,900 years ago, appeared suddenly and is a large, extremely well-crafted
weapon. A troubling insinuation of the “Solutrean” theory is that Native
Americans weren’t somehow able to invent the distinctive Clovis point on their
own.

One might think that the Out-of-Europe hypothesis was, at its worst, a harmless
crackpot theory--that this very terrestrial-adapted culture of the Iberian
Peninsula, with no evidence of maritime technology, overcame a frigid Atlantic
ocean during a time span of 5,000 years by iceberg-hopping in skin boats in
order to deliver the distinctive Clovis weapon system to the Southeastern
United States. But this scholarly squabble quickly grew ugly with the discovery
of Kennewick Man in 1996.

Civility evaporated during the nasty eight-year legal squabble over Kennewick
Man (a 9,000-year-old skeleton found in the Columbia River), and we were
reminded that archaeology lingers yet as a barely disguised insult to many
Native Americans. The central issue of Kennewick Man was his ancestry: Was he
of European origin?